


Discovery and Recovery

by 17826



Category: The Adventure Zone (Podcast)
Genre: Backstory, Found Families, Gen, Implied/Referenced Minor Character Death, Merle as a professor because fuck u he's cleverer than he thinks, Pre-Lost Century, Takes canon with a pinch of salt but compliant with everything that happens on-screen, The author has a dubious relationship with tenses so bear with me, Two Sun Planet, Worldbuilding
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-06-14
Updated: 2017-06-14
Packaged: 2018-11-14 05:17:49
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,968
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11201256
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/17826/pseuds/17826
Summary: From the age of 11, he had lived with his aunt, half an hour's walk from the edge of the only city on the island, and that pretty much summed up the situation.(Or, sometimes, you have to find yourself before you can find your family.)





	Discovery and Recovery

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the song Griffin wrote for the Petals to the Metal arc
> 
> The Implied/Referenced Minor Character Death is only to warn for a very few vague references to the fact that Magnus's parents died when he was young , there's very very little content to any of that , I just always think better safe than sorry when it comes to warnings ^^

From the age of 11, he had lived with his aunt, half an hour's walk from the edge of the only city on the island, and that pretty much summed up the situation. She wasn't his blood relative, just a widow of his father's younger sister, and he'd never known her name. They had never really become close enough for him to feel safe asking for it, not even when he had left, without much fanfare, at the age of 17. She hadn't even been there to see him off, hadn't even, he suspected, intended on saying goodbye. He had been woken by a lightning flash in the early hours of the morning on the day he was due to leave to find her strapping on her boots in the hallway outside his room.  
  
“It's just a storm,” she had said, without looking up. “Go back to bed.”   
  
When he had continued to watch her, she finished and peered up at him for a moment. He had been a quiet child his whole life, his words very few and far between, but he had rarely disobeyed a direct instruction.   
  
“Lock up when you leave, Magnus.” She had said before stepping out into the rain, the first time she had called him by name. He'd watched until her hazy outline had disappeared completely into the downpour, then he had gone back to bed.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
After leaving the place he couldn't have ever honestly called home, he had walked the day's travel it took to get to the port town in the west and worked in a shipyard hauling crates for six months. In this time, he earned enough to book passage on one of the smaller vessels making trips to the mainland, and he went through his second growth spurt, turning him from a gangly tall-enough-to-be-assumed-older into a musclebound considered-an-adult. For the most part he kept to himself, though some of the people he helped deliver to in the town came to know him enough to make small talk in the bakery he went to. The baker's daughter was one of only a handful of people his age, and she had traded a messy handjob, his first, for an inexpert fingerfuck, not her first, in their flour store, and then refused to meet his eyes ever again. His first kiss had been only a fortnight before, from a boy who left the island the same morning on a luxury passenger ship. Neither experience had held his thoughts for long.   
  
The ship he had been on was a slow one, mostly transporting a cargo of the island's speciality, a bean paste that benefited hugely, in his opinion, from being made in smaller batches and left to ferment a lot longer. The crew had consisted of only three full-time sailors, and one other passenger, a dragonborn called Alice who had also struck a deal of discounted fares in exchange for work. They had stopped off at five other islands before making it back to the mainland, and during the voyage he had had his 18th birthday. The captain of the ship, Nergüi, had allowed them all a night off to drink and laugh, and she had helped carry him to back to his bunk at the end of the night.   
  
“Your tongue is a lot looser when you're drunk,” she had observed as she helped him into his hammock.   
  
“Auntie… Auntie, thank you for the party, this was so fun, Auntie…” He had been giggling vaguely for a while, but had made sure to make a serious face when he spoke so she knew how much he meant it.   
  
“You're a man now, I think you can call me by name, we've reached that point.” She had been fondly exasperated at his tearful joy at this offer, which had seemed unfathomable to him, given that they had only transitioned from 'captain' to 'auntie' a fortnight ago.   
  
“Nergüi, Nergüi, Nergy, Nurgy, Nuggy… Thank you…”   
  
They had all been a little less pally the next day, each nursing a hangover through a particularly choppy day which had required all hands on deck to keep the cargo from smashing apart. In the evening, when the waves had died down, Alice had helped him climb up the mast to watch the suns set behind his island for the last time before it was swallowed by the horizon, and as they had sat next to each other in comfortable silence, for the first time he could remember, he had been aglow with happiness.   
  
After five weeks at sea, they had arrived at the port city as summer waned, and Alice had departed within minutes of docking, her fiancé whisking her away. Magnus had stayed to help well into the afternoon as half the cargo was unloaded, and then as the ship was restocked with letters and supplies, even with a few passengers-come-crew to replace him. Then Nergüi and her crew said their goodbyes, needing to sail a few hours up the coast to another port city before they could finish for the day, and he went alone to a cheap looking tavern for a greasy dinner and to find lodgings for the night.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
For a week, he had hung around in the city, spending a few days being satisfyingly touristy, this being the first time he had been to the mainland, and then a few days buying new gear and a map and asking around about the kind of trouble he might get into if he traveled alone outside of the city walls. The answer seemed, for the most part, to be negligible, so he had set out on a sunny morning, just picking a direction and walking.   
  
The mainland had been a lot colder than his island, especially as autumn arrived in earnest, but still sunny. His island had had two distinct seasons of hot and dry, then cold and rainy, so this cool sunshine had been new to him. He had followed new sensations like that across the land, often finding himself up in the tall, pinkish mountain range that dominated the northeast of his map. If he could find a river, there had been plenty to eat, fish and riverrats as well as berries and greenery on the banks, but on the weeks he found himself on open plains, he had made do with the brittle grass and the roots he could dig up. He had only known they were safe to eat from watching the small herds of mountain goats he sometimes crossed paths with, but never managed to move fast enough to hunt for dinner.   
  
Two years had passed this way, during which time encounters with other travelers were so rare that he could have counted them on one hand, and the only one of note being an elven hermit whose cave he had slept in one night, without realising there was anyone else there. The next morning, he had awoken to the elf pressed up against the opposite wall and shouting words he couldn't understand. After a few confused minutes, it had transpired that the elf was in fact deaf and had been making up the words, and instead they started tracing words in the air with their fingers, leaving fiery trails to create floating letters, first in elvish then in what he recognised as the common script.   
  
“Comm-own?” The elf had queried, their voice scratchy with lack of use.   
  
“I speak common, I don’t- I can't read it, sorry.” He had replied uncomfortably. “I speak common.” He had repeated himself with the only phrase he knew in elvish, emphasising the word he hoped meant 'speak’.   
  
The elf had given a low hum and turned to rummage through an overflowing chest, throwing aside scroll after book until they found a blue textbook with a title in elvish script, and they had presented it to Magnus along with a pencil and notebook, with a satisfied smile up at him.   
  
“You want me to…?” He had trailed off, and the elf had brandished the books at him, pressing them into his hands then pulling him over to sit at a small table. They had opened the textbook to a table of characters and traced them into the air one by one, stopping in between each for Magnus to copy. After they had run through the full alphabet, they had rolled their fingers round each other in an 'again’ gesture and went to make breakfast.   
  
For the next two days, the elf had bought him food and drink and sat with him, working through the textbook together. They had also traced more permanent words into the air above objects in and around the cave, and Magnus had made good progress. The elf had tested him by showing him images from other books and getting him to write their names in elvish, and had clapped loudly when he got it right. In return, Magnus had fixed the crooked grate on the firepit at the mouth of the cave, and darned the holes in the blankets the elf slept under. Both of these things, he knew, could have been done with magic, but the elf had smiled a wide, gummy, grin when they realised what he was doing, so he had done them anyway. On the third day, he had woken to an almost empty cave, all the furniture and belongings somehow packed into the elf's satchel, and the elf pushing a small bag towards him. Inside, he had found the blue textbook and his half-full notebook, as well as another notebook, a small bundle of pencils, a loaf of bread, and two more textbooks. One had seemed a sequel to the blue textbook, and the other had had elvish words on it he now understood to say 'common alphabet’.   
  
Not knowing what else to do, he had taken out his notebook and written the word 'heart’ in a shaky hand, holding it up for the elf to see.   
  
They had pressed a hand to his cheek for a moment, then pointed at themselves and then out to the right of the cave, towards the sun, and wrote the word 'cave’ in the air. Then, they had pointed at Magnus and out to the left of the cave.   
  
Quickly, Magnus had pointed at himself, then right, then written a question mark.   
  
The elf had shaken their head and repeated their previous gesture more emphatically.   
  
Magnus had sighed and nodded, then underlined 'heart’ in his notebook and held it up again. The elf had smiled softly at him, and kissed his forehead, then, before he could respond, had waved a cheery wave and walked out of the cave and away.   
  
But apart from these few days, his time in the mountain had been solitary, mostly preoccupied with simple matters of survival and, after the elf, learning to write in common and elvish, the second textbook pertaining to simple elvish grammar. He had stopped shaving so often, only ensuring his chin and lips were bare for hygiene's sake and letting his sideburns and hair grow out. He had braved the snowy winters by retreating to abandoned cave systems, with alphabets neither elvish nor common scratched into the walls, but he had taken care each day to walk to the mouth of his cave and watch the suns rising over the surrounding peaks. In this way, he had been happy.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
Eventually, self-sufficiency had become lonely, and he had started walking vaguely southwards. This brought him to new climates - a forest of plants three times the size they should be with spiders the size of cats, the edge of a desert that had stretched past the horizon, several bustling metropolises - and had bought him back to people again. He joined up with groups of travellers on the roads, met shopkeepers and locals in the cities, had run ins with several raider parties, and even hitchhiked for a while with an elf who taught him the sounds to go along with her alphabet. But then she had arrived at the village where her family lived, and he had traveled on alone.   
  
He had started picking destinations on the map, forests or mountains or cities, more attractive features presenting themselves the further south he had gone. From place to place, he had found groups to spend a few days with, then a few days alone before finding a new group. In this manner, he had come to the southernmost tip of the mainland not long after his 21st birthday, with a recommendation of a friend-of-a-friend who would let him stay a few nights if he helped babysit the kids.   
  
The friend-of-a-friend turned out to be Serena, the matriarch of a dwarven commune dedicated to Pan, which he had thought was an odd choice, considering how close the ocean was. The sea had always seemed to him a much fiercer presence than nature.   
  
When he voiced these thoughts aloud, Serena had smiled. “You're from across the sea, aren't you.” It hadn't really been a question.   
  
Magnus had cried that night, for maybe the first time since his parents had died over a decade ago. Serena had comforted him, sometimes with rote religious affirmations, but mostly with genuine sympathy; she had told him of a son she'd had, who'd left their commune after a screaming row, and about how she still loved him so dearly, after all these years. Love, she had told him, never really gets forgotten, and to miss that love didn't make him damaged, but instead proved he was whole.   
  
These Panite dwarves, he had concluded, were more than a little inclined to cheesy, sweeping aphorisms, but the emotions in them were more genuine than most. He spent a week with them, then picked a destination and moved on.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
He had followed the coast westwards after that, mostly avoiding the empty roads in favour of the forests and grasslands, and as winter frosts started to set into the nights, he had come to an ancient castle town. Over time it had become a city of tens of thousands, all nestled into the remains of a royal fortress from eras long forgotten, and underlaid by a winding labyrinth of tunnels that had been spreading outwards since the dwarven industrial boom, centuries ago. On the western coast, the weather was more hostile, and so he had found himself a job, working for food and board in a back alley tavern. The halfling family who owned the place had been kind, working him hard but allowing him one day off per week, and their young son Hassan had been a patient teacher in helping him improve his reading speed.   
  
His day off had become a day in which he explored the city and, once he found an entrance a few streets over, the vast caverns and corridors below the city surface. Like the caves in the mountains, the tunnels had been warmer than the surface once the snow settled in, and the occasional gerblin raid had been not so much dangerous as inconvenient. He hadn't stayed in one place this long for years, and soon he had mapped out most of the upper level tunnels under the city pretty accurately. If exploring the tunnels hadn't been strictly illegal, he might have actually drawn up some maps and sold them for a little extra money on the side.   
  
But the fact of the matter had been that he was exploring them, and he wasn't the only one. Travelers had been coming to the city for decades in search of dwarven treasures the tunnels could be hiding, and a fair few of them were offering handsome pay for guides. At first, he had stayed out of it, not wanting to get involved in black markets and tarnish the reputation of the tavern if he was discovered, but it quickly became clear that the other explorers who were accepting the guiding requests were either cursed or incompetent, the rate at which they were dying. By spring, he had become the only person still willingly going underground, and word was spreading.   
  
Shortly after the last snow had melted, his employers had told him, with not inconsiderable shame, that they could not afford to feed him that week, that in fact they could barely afford to feed themselves. Eyes on Hassan, whose cheekbones had never been so prominent, he had reassured them that he would find food elsewhere, and had that night taken an elf to a dungeon she had been sure would contain a treasure beyond imagining. He had, of course, been to that dungeon before and knew it to be long since empty, but she had been wearing earrings worth more than the entire tavern’s revenue that winter as she asked round for a guide, so he had felt no guilt in charging her a high commission for his services anyway. That night in the tavern, Hassan had eaten until he could barely remember what hunger felt like, and yet another chapter in Magnus's life had begun.   
  
For four months, he had taken up guide requests from rich fools who wanted to become richer fools. In the summer, gerblin encounters had been more vigorous and more frequent, and even bugbears had occasionally jumped out from the dark, and as such, Magnus became a better fighter than even his years in the wild had shaped him to be. With the money he had bought in, the tavern was refurbished and started thriving once more, bringing in it's own income until the money from the tunnels became surplus. Magnus had donated frequently and anonymously to the city's orphanages during these months.   
  
If he had stopped to think about it, he would have known that he was as comfortable as he had ever been in that city, with a reliable source of food and shelter and an income that allowed him to give generously to charity. He had even been on a couple dates, though nothing that had stuck. He would have also known that comfortable is not the same as happy, and maybe he would have moved on sooner, but the fact was he didn't, and so the end came very abruptly as the summer equinox approached.   
  
He had left in the middle of the night, whispering goodbyes to Hassan and his parents, after the first posters were put up around the city offering hefty rewards for any information leading to the capture of the man known only as 'The Mapmaker’, and promising a life sentence for 'endangerment, entrapment, and destruction and theft of private property’. He had never been a criminal before, but he knew enough to not stick around near the people he cared about. And so, Magnus had left the first place he'd called home since he was a child.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
He had traveled by train after that, a long, cross-country machine that moved faster than anything he'd ever seen, seemingly fueled only by the new technologies that were disseminating outwards from the capital. He had been given the only place left on the train due to his late boarding, an empty space in the luggage hold, which was less than comfy but meant he had first pick of the food carts when they came through. There had been no windows in the luggage carriage, and so the week of his journey to the capital had passed in a strange way for him, had felt somehow outside of time with no way to mark the passing of days other than the breakfast and dinner carts.   
  
Accordingly, when he got off the train at the capital, he had felt a strange disconnect from his surroundings; most train stations looked pretty similar, so he felt almost like he'd arrived back where he'd started, both at the ancient city where he'd got on the train, and the port he'd first arrived in when he came to the mainland. So he had done way he had always done in this situation, and gone to find a tavern.   
  
"Hey, handsome! Yeah, you, with the nice arms... Fancy buying a drink for a pretty boy?" After finishing his first pint, he had looked up to find a chubby elf with dark curls slouch down into the seat opposite his own.   
  
A second elf, almost identical, fell into the third seat and drunkenly lent towards the first, slurring something in elvish. They spoke quickly together, thick western accents, and Magnus had let his elvish slip a bit but he caught a few words, 'young' and 'poor' and 'time' from the second elf, and 'short' and 'fun' from the first. The second elf had then turned back to him.   
  
"Sorry, rude of us, arguing over you right in front of you, I'm Lup, I'm his more attractive sister." She batted her eyelashes slightly as she spoke. "He's Taako, and he's a lot prettier when he's sober."   
  
Magnus privately had disagreed with that, first because they were both ridiculously pretty as they were, and second because he'd worked in tavern's for almost a year, on and off, and he knew when someone was only acting drunk. He had kept that to himself, however, as he bought a round and was promptly challenged to a game of pool. He had giggled along with the twins as they all let their shots slip through their fingers, fumbling the cues for two long games, and he had won marginally each time, and each time let Taako raise the stakes. On the third game, they were playing double or quits on 50 gold pieces, and Lup started the game with a perfect break. Both twins suddenly stood up a lot straighter, their stumbling clumsiness, predictably, gone. Magnus left his act in place, but shot the best game he'd ever played in his life.   
  
The look on Taako's face as he won was worth more than the 200 gold he earned, so he gave half of it back, and with a kiss to each of their cheeks.   
  
"Would you be interested in dating me?" Lup had asked outright. In response, he had pressed a kiss to her other cheek and left them to pay his tab.   
  
After that, he had found a room for the night and settled down to pick his next destination, opening the tattered map he'd drawn all his routes on. It had, by that point, resembled nothing so much as a tangle of string, criss-crossing over itself around the country. There was barely a village on it he hadn't been to. Looking down at it, he had realised that he had completed what he set out to do, that he had truly traveled the world. He hadn't really known how to feel about that, so he had gone to bed.   
  
Sunrise the next morning had found him wandering through the nearly empty streets, looking for a newspaper and a cafe to read it in. Both presented themselves within half an hour, and so he had settled down in Fantasy Starbucks to people watch as the city woke up and started making its way to work. He had thought about joining them, of getting an office job or applying to university, finding a flat that would allow dogs, making this morning newspaper and coffee run a part of his weekly routine, spending the rest of his life that way. He hadn't felt much of anything about that.   
  
Worth a try, he thought, and opened the newspaper to the job ads; only one stood out.   
  
Three days later had found him nervously picking at his nails in a waiting room, wearing what could only loosely be described as 'business attire', ten minutes early for an interview. A bearded dwarf in a garish floral shirt had been his only companion.   
  
"You here for an interview?" The dwarf had asked, after five minutes of tense silence.   
  
"Yeah, night guard job. You?" Magnus had replied.   
  
"Applying for postdoc research, humanoid biology."   
  
"Awesome, good luck."   
  
"Thanks, Pan knows I need it." The dwarf had shifted uncomfortably, then added as an afterthought, "same back at you too, dude."   
  
Something had prickled at the back of Magnus's neck, and he looked closer at the dwarf's sunkissed skin and seashell bracelet. "I'm Magnus Burnsides." He had offered his hand.   
  
"Merle Highchurch, good to meet you, Magnets." The dwarf had shook his hand firmly. "What's that look for? Did I get your name wrong?"   
  
"No, I- I mean, yes, you did, I'm Magnus, but... This is weird, sorry, I think I know your mum? Serena?"   
  
"Oh, that old bat. Sorry for your loss!" Merle had guffawed. Then Magnus had been called into his interview and that had been that.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
Working night shifts for the campus security team at the Institute of Planar Research and Exploration had suited Magnus pretty well. It had paid well, so he could have a small one-room to himself, and could finish off his Thursday shift with the Friday morning paper and a pastry. He hadn't ever worked out how to fit a dog of his own into his routine, but he had volunteered at the shelter once a week, so he'd been okay.   
  
He'd also struck up a good friendship with Merle, whose office was on one of his regular perimeter walks, in which he often found Merle asleep at his desk. After a while, he had stopped trying to wake him, and instead just carried him gently to the couch, moved a few stacks of paper to make space, and covered him in a blanket.   
  
In exam season of his first year working there, only a few months after he'd started, he'd also come across a familiar face in the library; Taako had been curled around a thick, old-looking book, staring glumly out at the deep violet night sky.   
  
"Hail and well met, Taako," he'd said quietly in Elvish.   
  
Taako had glared groggily up at him for a second before recognising him with a sigh and gesturing to the seat opposite. "Your accent is terrible."   
  
Magnus had slid into the booth, pushing a crumpled pile of paper aeroplanes out the way to do so. "I write better than I speak."   
  
"You'd better hope so, my man. This is how you knew we were scamming you at pool, isn't it."   
  
It hadn't been a question but Magnus had replied anyway, reverting to common. "Nah, mostly it's because you're terrible at acting drunk. Where is Lup tonight?"   
  
Taako had bristled, either from the insult or the mention of his sister, Magnus couldn't tell. "Kicked me out, she's entertaining a lady guest. Plus, y'know," he had gestured to the large tome he'd been propping his head up on, "exams in the morning."   
  
"Chapter 12, Transmutation in Complex Handmade Items," Magnus had read the elvish upside down, and got up to leave. "Well, I won't interrupt then."   
  
"Too late."   
  
He had bought Taako some coffee on his next round, and they'd built a friendship from there, mostly on a combination of insults and a shared love for competitive surfing. He'd met Taako's friends when they had gone out to celebrate Lup and Taako being accepted for postgraduate research positions in the arcana department, and those friend-of-a-friends had eventually become just friends. Sometimes, he had invited Merle along too, and he had worried that adding a professor to the mix would elevate the number of over-his-head academic discussions to unbearable levels, but the grouping had worked better than anyone could have predicted. So just over a year later, when the light of creation had landed and Lup's friend Barry and Merle's friend Davenport had started to put together a team for an interplanar mission, saying yes had been only too easy.   
  
As they had stood, the seven of them, on that stage in the press conference, in the moments before the lights had flashed on, he had known, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that they would become so much more than what they were that day.   
  
  
  
***   
  
  
  
And now he looked up at Lucretia, finally fully understanding, for the first time in decades or maybe even ever, who she was and what she was capable of doing. Next to him, Taako, a person halved without Lup at his side, slightly less attractive than he had been but infinitely more beautiful now, more powerful than ever. On his left, Merle, whose fragmented life and ebbing self-worth made so much more sense now that he knew why it was nonsensical, who had built himself a whole family in this reality, separate to the one he'd left behind centuries ago; Merle, who he now couldn't imagine life without. Barry too, who'd been looking for them for so long to try and save this whole world, and Davenport, reduced from the genius for to define his generation to a butler capable of little else other than carrying out orders.   
  
Carey and Killian and Angus also were watching him, perhaps not entwined with his life the way the crew were, not destined to find him over and over again, but instead chosen. Magnus chose them to be part of his life, part of his disjointed little family, and wasn't that more powerful?   
  
And the hunger is coming, truthfully the hunger is already here. They had to stop it, they had to save this reality, there was no question about that, and they had to resurrect Lup too. Somehow all these things must happen, and he knew he couldn't let even one of them slip, because this is his family. He's finally found it, and there was no way in hell he is letting it go again.   
  
Lucretia looked so tired, she'd been alone too long. Time for him to do what he'd trained his whole, long life to do; time for Magnus to save these people, and to save this world.

**Author's Note:**

> There u go , all my headcanons about pre-lost century Magnus , stacked one on top of another in a trenchcoat , masquerading as a fic ^^ I mostly ignored that Travis said he was a like sarcastic little shit of a child and went with something closer to what I think would mould the kind of person Magnus grows up to be ~ this'll probably get contradicted by canon later , but that's what fanfic is for
> 
> Thank u for reading ^^ concrit is always welcome and I live for comments and kudos !


End file.
